Wii Vitality canceled for time being

It has been a long road for the Wii Vitality Sensor that Nintendo announced way back in 2009 at E3. The Vitality Sensor came on the heels of the Wii Fit craze, and the strange concept of monitoring pulse of humans and integrating it into a video game just never worked as expected, despite significant development and cost.

According to reports, the Vitality Sensor only worked reliably on 9 out of 10 people in testing, which of course isn’t the kind of track record you want when taking a product to market. Despite canceling it for the time being, Nintendo still claims that there is value in the product; but as a commercial product it isn’t ready for prime time just yet.

While we expect Nintendo to give up on the Vitality Sensor as first announced, we suspect that the company will continue to investigate the possible applications for the technology and what it could be used for going forward. We also suspect that Nintendo has patented the heck out of the technology and its use with video games, so that is going to limit what could be done, since Nintendo is holding the rights.